1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for extracting salient object from stereoscopic image and in particular an enhanced method for extracting salient object from stereoscopic image by using contrast of a 3D image and prior-knowledge of an image and by applying the quality of disparity to the image.
2. Description of Related Art Including Information Disclosed Under 37 CFR 1.97 and 37 CFR 1.98
In stereoscopic image, 3D image is reproduced by shooting the same object with cameras spaced apart to obtain a left-eye image and a right-eye image and by displaying the left-eye and right-eye images alternately. In case that the left-eye image and the right-eye image are displayed alternately, binocular disparity is generated in the imaginary image without need to shoot the object, and the left-eye and right-eye images are transmitted to brain via retina and then the images are merged to reproduce the depth perception and the presence of the image for the experience of 3D image.
Since interest in 3D images is increasing and a method for extracting salient object from 3D image is used as a pre-process in 3D image processing, the method is very important. There have been a number of researches on the method for extracting salient object or region of an image in the field of computer vision applications such as image segmentation, image retrieval, object recognition, etc.
Korean patent publication No. 2013-0052393 (published on May 22, 2013, Title: apparatus and method for extracting object using 3D image) suggests that a 2D image and a 3D image for the object are obtained and the object is extracted in accordance with the size change of the object by distance information of 3D image.
In stereoscopic image, disparity information of the image is used to extract salient region. However, since it is difficult to calculate the image disparity information correctly, it is hard to extract salient object or region.